Very Brief Musings on Democracy

Cf.: Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

And:

Cf: Martin Wolf: Capitalism and Democracy: The Strain Is Showing:

Confidence in an enduring marriage between liberal democracy and global capitalism seems unwarranted….

So what might take its place? One possibility[:]… a global plutocracy and so in effect the end of national democracies. As in the Roman empire, the forms of republics might endure but the reality would be gone.

An opposite alternative would be the rise of illiberal democracies or outright plebiscitary dictatorships… [like] Russia and Turkey…. Something rather like that happened in the 1930s. It is not hard to identify western politicians who would love to go in exactly this direction. Meanwhile, those of us who wish to preserve both liberal democracy and global capitalism must confront serious questions. One is whether it makes sense to promote further international agreements that tightly constrain national regulatory discretion in the interests of existing corporations…. Above all… economic policy must be orientated towards promoting the interests of the many not the few; in the first place would be the citizenry, to whom the politicians are accountable. If we fail to do this, the basis of our political order seems likely to founder. That would be good for no one. The marriage of liberal democracy with capitalism needs some nurturing. It must not be taken for granted…

As I see it:

1. Democracy has never been an especially good way of choosing smart, technocratic leaders. Democracy has different excellences…

2. Democracy’s primary excellence is that it rules out the mirage of violent revolution as a chiliastic solution to current disappointments: the problem is not that the people are oppressed but rather that the people chose to be governed by the current group of clowns–and that is the problem that needs to be fixed…

3. Democracy’s secondary excellence is that it provides a powerful degree of insulation against rent-seeking by the currently rich, who are always in favor of wealth extraction from the rest and generally opposed to the creative destruction that economic growth brings–for they are the ones creatively destroyed…

4. We have the wrong kind of democracy in Europe: the electorate that matters is the German electorate, and from the perspective of the holders of political power in Germany, depression elsewhere in Europe is not a problem but rather a source of support from an electorate feeling the schadenfreude–as long as Germany continues to be an export powerhouse…

5. We have the wrong kind of democracy in the United States: the gerrymandered Republican legislators of Capitol Hill see a sluggish economy not as a threat to their position to be solved but rather as a demonstration that they are right in their contempt for the Democratic president…

6. We have the wrong kind of democracy in Britain–Cameron and Osborne’s economic policy failure has indeed gotten that set of bastards thrown out, but their successors have no better ideas about how to generate economic prosperity than they did…

7. The result has been the rise of a movement opposed to the norms of representative compromise government that has more than faint echoes of the fascist moments of early twentieth century Europe–but this time not just in Europe and on the fringe in the United States…

8. Nevertheless, if we can get back to a non-wrong kind of democracy–on the European continent, in Britain, and in the U.S.–its primary and secondary excellences will still be of enormous value…